Not to pick on this person, it’s a funny protest sign — but it seems like a lot of people are thinking like we’re in a “one weird trick” (impeachment) scenario and, once we get that done, we’ll magically return to some type of “normal” and we can all go home… but the concept of normality is doing some heavy lifting here.
What “normal” looks like
It’s normal for minimum wage to stay the same for decades.
It’s normal that people earning low wages must work multiple jobs and often still qualify for food stamps.
It’s normal that billionaires exist when low-paid workers have to decide between the power bill and paying the rent.
It’s normal that disabled people effectively cannot marry, since they’ll often lose access to government support.
It’s normal to use prisoners as slave labor (or close enough to it with hourly “wages” of pennies).
It’s normal that immigrants from some countries must wait decades to become citizens because of arbitrary caps.
It’s normal to let immigrants get paid less and treated worse in tech jobs because they’re trapped by H1B visa requirements.
It’s normal that *everyone* in America is to some extent trapped in their job because healthcare is ruinously expensive.
It’s normal that Americans die of preventable disease for lack of money.
It’s normal that women don’t get to choose what medical treatment they receive if they are pregnant.
It’s normal to address gun violence by blaming mental health but not increasing funding to expand access.
It’s normal to “solve” homelessness by throwing away all of someone’s worldly possessions and putting them on a one-way bus out of town.
It’s normal that kids go hungry at lunch.
It’s normal that Puerto Ricans and people from D.C. are denied congressional representation.
It’s normal that 70- and 80-year-olds hold most of the political power in the country, and people under 40 very little.
It’s normal to hand over all our personal data to megacorporations who run extensive systems of surveillance that they share with law enforcement.
It’s normal that the government spies on its own citizens.
It’s normal that hundreds of people die in car crashes daily.
It’s normal that our spaces are built for cars, not people, and driving is often the only way to get around.
It’s normal that the US government doesn’t honor its treaties with Tribes.
It’s normal that we supply Israel with funding while they enact genocide.
It’s normal that our water rights system is so terrible, and our water use so excessive, that the Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of California.
It’s normal that downstream communities must bear the health burdens and costs of upstream industrial polluters.
Thinking bigger than just getting out of this
“Normal” fucking sucks. Outright fascism is worse, but there are plenty of things we need to change. Kat Abughazaleh, who’s running for office in Illinois, says:
“There’s no reason every American should not be able to afford housing, groceries, health insurance, public transit (ideally), and then still have enough money to save and take your kid to the zoo or go to the movies with your friends. There’s just, there’s no reason — we are the wealthiest country in the world. The idea that that’s unrealistic or idealistic or naive or even called childish, I think that’s sucky.”
We don’t have to settle for returning to a normal that sucks — but protest may not be enough to force change. Our current situation has been the Republican gameplan for decades; we will not escape it by liberating ourselves from a single politician. Trump is a symptom, but the rot runs much deeper. We need to reckon emotionally with the long fights ahead; protests alone will not solve our problems. I’m not saying protest isn’t helpful or important — I’m saying that we need to find space for both brunch and advocacy in our lives. Micah L. Sifry writes:
One of the most inspiring ways that pro-democracy movements grow their strength is by inventing and spreading ways for the silent majority to make itself both visible and influential.
I’ve been seeing organizers talking about the need to transform the current energy into long-term work, and not let it fizzle out. Jared Yates Sexton describes the way that authorities rein in public speech:
We are, according to those who want nothing more than to maintain control, supposed to protest enough, but not too much. Because we should rely on them. Because we need to maintain our subservient position under the party as opposed to in conversation and discourse with the party.
One strategy: focusing on local advocacy and building up
My pet theory is that most people should spend their advocacy time supporting local (and state) efforts, and donate to organizations advocating at the federal level. The collapse of local news and intense media focus on national politics encourages people to feel powerless because at the federal level most of what you can do is harass your senator. It also frames politics as something “you do” once every four years for normies, every two years for the passionate, every election for the wonks and zealots. If you get people involved in local politics, I imagine that get-out-the-vote drives become a lot easier because people are already tuned in.
The local level is more influential than people realize, I suspect. In Washington State, how environmental policies often play out is that they get implemented at either King County or City of Seattle first, then several suburban cities, and then there’s a model and coalition for building a state-level policy. As former city staff, I can say it’s no accident it works this way — we knew our colleagues at other cities and would learn from each other, sharing lessons and draft policy language. Regional organizations support, both partnering with cities and going down to Olympia during the legislative session to advocate for (and against) bills. We know that Republicans followed a similar model in the evil direction in red states, building up a portfolio of harmful policies to bring to the federal level in the form of Project 2025… why don’t we do the same for progressive policies?
If we start thinking and working now, we can set things up for the next state legislative session, then the next federal election, then the presidential election. (I’m not going down rabbitholes about martial law, I don’t find it helpful to indulge in that kind of despairing fatalism — I think my personal work on managing catastrophic thinking and anxiety has paid dividends here.)
I haven’t decided what bigger thing I want to work on yet… for now I’ve just been doing ad hoc advocacy when it’s pointed out by the urbanist Discord server I’m in. I’m pissed that Washington had a school lunch bill that failed in the legislative session, so potentially supporting another run at that… or badgering the governor about Washington’s regressive taxation policy and demanding an income tax on the wealthiest Washingtonians, which he put the kibosh on this budget cycle and was why the budget was too tight to feed kids 🙄 Come on, Bob! We have a lot of tech companies — and tech CEOs — here who could stand to pay their fair share. Or I could go harder on supporting housing; I just looked at King County’s affordable housing dashboard, which identifies a need for 44,000 affordable units by 2024, and THE ENTIRE SEATTLE AREA HAD BUILT FEWER THAN FIVE THOUSAND UNITS by 2022. *screaming*
Organizing coalitions
I’m also spinning on the provocation of the second method of organizing described in the Win the Midwest’s 10-year report (emphasis mine):
There are two approaches to base building. We can ask what we are for, and then go out and find the people who agree with us. Or we can begin by asking who we need to organize in order to build enough power to shift everything, and then go where they are: workplaces, churches, mosques, synagogues, schools, and childcare centers. Grassroots organizations that meet people where they are – physically and ideologically – and that create spaces of belonging, learning, and formation rooted in people’s lives and experiences have an unlimited number of people to organize. Most people do not have clearly defined political outlooks, but they can move into public leadership roles. Organizations willing to put their base at the center of their plans can co-create a political agenda that emerges from the lived experience of their bases.
I’m an extremely opinionated person, and I know what outcomes I want (though I’d rather listen to others on the best tactics on achieving those outcomes), but maybe I could think of this as prioritizing which outcomes to focus on based on which ones enough other people also want and will fight for. L.A. Kauffman discusses building coalitions with those we disagree with, quoting a 1981 talk / 1983 essay “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century”:
“The reason we are stumbling,” Dr. [Bernice] Reagon declared all those years ago, “is that we are at the point where in order to take the next step we’ve got to do it with some folk we don’t care too much about. And we got to vomit over that for a little while. We must just keep going.”
Further reading:
Why Do Anything? by Dj Bracken — this guy decided to start paying down student lunch debt in Utah, and eventually helped get a statewide bill passed (I was loosely involved in supporting new “share tables” / fridges at our local elementary schools, AMA)
From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty by Kelly Hayes
See also:
Don’t let them say it’s normal
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